Texas Instruments and Red Hat conferences in Tel Aviv

Texas Instruments' technical conference drew 300 embedded engineers. Good news for Israelis and the company. The embedded processor (microcontroller) field is fractured with over twenty suppliers. TI is bringing their expertise in DSP to the Israeli engineering world. / © 2010

Last week Texas Instruments (TI) and Red Hat (earlier this week) held their annual conferences in Tel Aviv. Both companies announced new developments. Texas Instruments (TI) has revamped their controller and microprocessor lines. Red Hat is going to announce their Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (RHEL6) in a few weeks. The TI conference was a relatively small meeting with about 300 attendees. TI has not been a big microprocessor and microcontroller supplier until now. The Israeli market is small but strong in embedded devices. This makes a day conference with presentation from key corporate executives a crucial market presence. The Red Hat conference was attended by 1,200 people. Matrix, Red Hat's distributor in Israel, announced their 600th enterprise customer, which is over 50% growth the last year. Overall, Red Hat's low price and strong support, has been successful in today's weak IT market. Spending on IT is still low relative to the early 2000 spending rate. Red Hat competes with Microsoft selling enterprise servers to corporate customers, Fortune 1000 companies.

Tel Aviv is a good place to hold technical conferences. It is centrally located to most attendees and has plenty of hotels to accommodate a few hundred people. There are usually ten technical conferences in Tel Aviv (and the surrounding cities) each week. There is a "high season" for conferences, it starts in the fall and goes through winter. The season takes breaks during state holidays and school vacations. We just passed the Jewish high holiday season so conferences are in their peak period. Israel's technology industry is clustered in a few locations. The biggest cluster of technology companies is around Tel Aviv, with Haifa in the north and Jerusalem to the east the other clusters. Since Israel has a few technology specialties and the technology field is small (relative to bigger countries), in one conference a company can bring a focused audience and cover the whole country. This enables a company to discover the state of the market in one day, connect with engineers and IT managers and give their story directly to real users and managers. Israel is especially a good place to test a new product introductions, new business models or see how the market will respond to new technologies. The Israeli market is sophisticated, there are good potential customers and geographically Israel is close to Europe and middle eastern markets. Besides this, Europeans love to come to Tel Aviv in winter. The fall is also a great time to come, temperatures are not too hot, yet you can walk around with a short sleeve shirt or a suite and tie. Add to a visit here all the benefits of a medium size metropolitan city, modeled after European and American ones, and you have a perfect (technology) combination. Come and see Tel Aviv's technology live and in person, in fall or winter.

One unique aspect of Israel's technology world is its technical depth. In the Red Hat conference, a presenter from IBM gave a talk on the state of IT business today and shifting trends IBM sees (Web2.0, mobile communication.) The talk was wonderful but did not hit the mark. IBM is a big company and has a wide range of audiences. A talk about the general state of the IT technology today can be targeted at executives, both government and private industry, or can be more technical and targeted at key technology decision makers. The IBM talk had general technology trends but not enough for technical decision makers. This seems to happen more here in Israel than in other places. The country's small scale brings into one place both the high level executives all the way to the operational IT managers. This is something foreign speakers need to take into account. It is also something that Israeli organizers need to coach foreign speakers, if they are going to give relevant and interesting talks.